Last week, Devan Bonagura, who goes by @dbon973_ on TikTok, posted a video of the Walmart employee quietly sitting alone in the break room. "Life shouldn't be this hard," he wrote in the video, which was viewed more than 26-million times and received millions of likes and thousands of comments.
Bonagura learned the employee, Nola, is 81 and needs to keep working in her retirement years so she could pay off her mortgage. He then set up a GoFundMe to help Nola get closer to retiring. The initial goal of the crowdfunding campaign was $10-thousand, but in less than 24 hours supporters blew way past that by raising over $100-thousand. It's now almost 175 grand!
She is now able to completely pay off her mortgage and fully retire. Nola’s granddaughter posted a video thanking all the supporters on behalf of Nola and her family for helping their grandmother. "I just want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart,” she says in the video. “It means a lot to all of us that you did this for her and it was a very kind thing for you to do. Thank you very, very much from all of us."